Fragile, resilient
The extraordinary lives of a Jewish family in Paris in the 19th and 20th centuries are recounted in this elegant, tender, and disturbing series of letters.
The Hare
With Amber Eyes
Letters to Camondo arts, accepted in high society and given Napoleonic titles: Moise de Camondo was a count. They built magnificent houses around the Parc Monceau and filled them with works of art. Moise de Camono’s taste was impeccable.
Inevitably their wealth provoked antiSemitism. Nevertheless, throughout the years of the Second Empire and Third Republic, there was no country where bourgeois and haut-bourgeois Jews flourished as they did in France.
Far from seeing themselves as “rootless cosmopolitans” (though they called themselves Israelites rather than Jews), they were or had become French and French patriots.
When Moise died, he left his beautiful house and great collection, which de Waal describes with loving appreciation, to the French state.
It was to be a museum, preserved as it was, with nothing sold or to be lent.
The museum is not in his name but commemorates his son Nissim, a pilot shot down over German lines and killed in September 1917, “mort pour la France”, and awarded a posthumous Legion d’Honneur.
Chapters of the book describe the collections, with pages of beautiful illustrations, and life in the house in the rue Monceau with its dozen servants and grand dinners, menus attached. There are reproductions of portraits of beautiful girls, daughters and granddaughters painted by Renoir.
Then the extended family with a vast cousinship spread itself beyond Paris, with chateaux in the Ile-de-France and villas on the Riviera.
Huge sums were given to charities, money spent also on hunting and racing. De Waal describes its life with a tender fascination.
One might like to learn more about the sources of its vast wealth, but, for the moment it may be enough to delight in the idyllic perfection de Waal presents to us.
Even as you do so, you cannot but be aware of its fragility, cannot forget the madness and horror in the ascendant in Germany – madness and horror against which wealth and high culture offered no defence.
Yet even after 1940, with France occupied by Nazi Germany, some sort of denial seems to have persisted. There is a photograph of Moise’s grand-daughter Fanny guiding her horse over fences in
1942. But in the Musée Nassim, a plaque records that Moise’s daughter Beatrice, her children Fanny and Bertrand and her husband Leon Reinach were deported 1943-4: “Sont morts a’Auschwitz”.
The Musée Nassim is still there in the care of the Musée des Arts Decoratifs.
It bears witness to the survival of what Klaus Mann called “the brown plague” which set out to destroy Jews for all time in the evil madness of the death camps.
This is a marvellous book, elegant, tender, loving, appreciative, disturbing, a reminder of both the fragility and resilience of high culture, indeed civilisation.
What matters about this book, though, is not its occasional attempts to apportion blame, but the rigour with which it lays out the facts that enable us to draw our own conclusions.
Of the 286 girls taken, 61 escaped early in the kidnap, and 103 were eventually released. Of the rest, though – killed in rocket attacks on Boko Haram bases, or forced into “marriage” and motherhood under the most perilous war conditions – we can say only that they are not home yet.